The Ender’s Game Movie is Scrapped

An article at the Los Angeles Times talking about Orson Scott Card’s new Ender novel, “Ender in Exile,” states that director Wolfgang Petersen is no longer attached to direct the big screen adaptation of Card’s “Ender’s Game”:

“Soldiers, in a sense, never come home,” he said. “[Those] who have seen radical violence are never able to share that. We regard it as pathology if they do.”

This complex weave of emotions has made Ender especially difficult to film and has resulted in two decades of fizzled studio meetings, dead-end scripts and a marathon director search. The author said he was not interested in a “tough-hero action film” and refuses to condescend to green-screen Hollywood. Card imagines a “film where the human relationships are absolutely essential — an honest presentation of the story.”

“Ender’s Game” was recently in development with director Wolfgang Petersen (“In the Line of Fire,” “The Perfect Storm,” “Troy”) on board, but Card did not feel comfortable with the movie’s direction. That project was scrapped early in November.